Reveling Tragedy

In “Grief Lessons,” the contemporary poet and classicist Anne Carson’s spare and beautiful new translation of four of Euripides’ lesser-known tragedies, we have a kind of primer on the intrinsic dangers of blind devotion to ideology. In the plays, many of which were produced during the Peloponnesian War, Euripides sought to explore—most touchingly—what conquest meant to the women and children who were left behind to suffer, steal, beg, and lie in order to survive, and fathers and sons who brought calamity home while seeking rule elsewhere. Dismantling the “towers of words” that one character speaks of in “Herakles” in favor of simpler language, Carson offers us a familiar portrait: Herakles is a man whose hubris, political and otherwise, brings his nobility to a crashing close. Carson focusses on Herakles’ ”berserker furor,” offering an apt description of an imperialist, ancient or modern, who fails to provide for his people’s safety or who sends young soldiers to fight wars that rob them and their country of the promise inherent in tomorrow.

Hilton Als, The New Yorker’s theatre critic, wrote the catalogue essay for the Robert Gober retrospective currently on view at the Museum of Modern Art.